Cercar en aquest blog

Compte enrere

15 de maig 2014

LOVE SHAK, by Matthew Tree

Catalonia Today article for May, by Matthew Tree, about Shakira...

Shakira lives in Barcelona, goes out with and has had a son by a Barça
footballer, and her last name is the distinctly Catalan one of Ripoll.
She must have known somewhere along the line that sooner or later she
was going to sing at least one song in Spain's second language, and in
the end she chose 'Boig per tu' ('Crazy About You')
composed by Pep Sala in 1990, and made famous by the band Sau, of which
Sala was one of the two frontmen ...together with the late Carles Sabater.
Shakira's latest album – intriguingly called 'Shakira' - was released
last month and features a version of 'Boig per tu' in the Catalan
original (she also included a version in Spanish: 'Loca por ti');
however, the edition of the album which includes 'Boig per tu' is for
the Latin American and Spanish markets only (Anglo-American buyers don't
get to hear it). I could have told Shakira's PR people – had I managed
to get within waving distance of any of them - that they were making a
big mistake, and that the Catalan version should have been available for
the Latin American and Anglo-American markets, but not, under any
circumstances, for the Spanish one. Thus, the inevitable might have been
avoided: a Spain-generated spate of hate tweets sent to the Colombian
star, for having dared to record a song in Catalan. These messages – and
I translate from the originals – called her, among other things,
'mentally retarded', 'an imbecile', 'pig', 'subnormal', 'disgusting',
'monkey like', 'stupid' and (in one comment laced with a biting irony
lacking in other messages) 'so very international'.

The tone of such
missives is fairly symptomatic of the revulsion towards all things
Catalan which has been fostered for generations by politicians and media
among a sizeable sector – no one knows if a minority or a majority - of
the Spanish population. The good news is that these insults – having
been directed at a world-famous artist who has sold 70 million albums –
were reported by two major American newspapers and the BBC, thus
revealing internationally what most of us who live here are already well
aware of: that such catalanophobia is one of the main, albeit little
known, reasons Catalonia will be leaving Spain any lustrum now.

By the
by, in spite of – or perhaps partly thanks to – the quasi-racist
put-downs of her Spanish nationalist detractors, Shakira's (excellent)
version of 'Boig per tu' is, at the time of writing, the current
worldwide number one single on Spotify.